Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

grades are the worst. i love school, though.

http://nymag.com/thecut/2015/07/columbia-says-no-to-trigger-warnings.html

like it says, no trigger warnings to be added to columbia's required reading list

http://www.happytrailsforever.com/view/uploads/Triggerbook-byPando.jpg

phew, that book /will/ stay on columbia's Great Books core curriculum

kinda surprised professors are holding the line on this.

I wonder if the ways in which universities currently handle disabilities is going to be the end game for this. what's the term? "reasonable accommodation" or something?

isn't that what peeps are always hammerin neville chamberlain for

trigger warnings in our time

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/0b/0a/04/0b0a04481630bff55a4ce4105b424dc2.jpg

it's a good sign i think

kinda surprised professors are holding the line on this.

This whole situation has gotten so twisty and confused that I authentically have no idea what stance you mean when you say "holding the line"

referring to this link by j
http://nymag.com/thecut/2015/07/columbia-says-no-to-trigger-warnings.html

Though students have asked for trigger warnings at schools like U.C. Santa Barbara and Oberlin, professors have largely opposed them: A 2014 report drafted by the American Association of University Professors argues that making trigger warnings university policy poses a threat to their academic freedom and is "counterproductive to the educational experience."

do people here have opinions about this case?

http://torontoist.com/2012/11/online-harassment-is-more-prevalent-and-taken-more-seriously-than-ever/

http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/christie-blatchford-ruling-in-twitter-harassment-trial-could-have-enormous-fallout-for-free-speech

https://nationalpostcom.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/twitter-trail.jpg?w=620&h=465

take him away boys

that guy is creep & asshole
but criminalizing that kind of internet trolling?
(nb no allegation of irl threatening)
NO
seriously opposed to this

lol stop

What if someone showed up everywhere you went and interrupted everything you said? It would take, idk, maybe 3-5 appearances until most ppl called the police or threatened legal action, and that's if the stalker didn't make any literal threats.

Neither of those articles, or the other articles that came up when I googled his name, provide the content of the tweets in question as far as I can tell. Really no idea what is going on here.

i don't think 'what if someone showed up everywhere you went and interrupted everything you said' is an apt comparison, though none of the ones that seem apt to me obviously translate over unchanged

isn't it more like, what if you were a public speaker and (the same) someone always came and asked a question from the audience?

or what if you were a public figure and a tabloid reporter always followed you around in public goading you for a reaction?

Hm maybe, but on twitter EVERYONE is a "public speaker" so it ceases to be notable as such. That doesn't make it private, but I think in terms of what it means for someone to relentlessly interact with you when you've discouraged them from doing so, it's closer to violating someone's personal space than it is to just coincidentally being at the same public event, metaphorically speaking.

my problem is, criminalization
in absence of irl threat, criterion here seems completely arbitrary
& (esp since we’re talking criminal law here) imo threat to free speech
nb this isn't even case of 'hate speech'
not opposed to org/corps/platforms (twitter, reddit, ilx) implementing certain mechanisms to deal with this kind of thing, to weed out certain forms of online harassment
but i don’t think internet trolls (who don’t represent any irl threat) should be arrested & go to jail

xp i think 'public speaker' is still a relevant distinction because it tracks the way that a person on twitter has opted for public visibility/audiblity/accessability. like, you give a lecture, there are gonna be people there talking back, even annoyingly so. you can keep them out of your house; if they follow you around when you're going to the supermarket, you can shut that down. but 'talking at the places and times i'm talking in public'? when someone tweets at you, in reply to your public tweets, where is the personal space?

like, i don't think it's useful to automatically equate personal existence (of the sort that can be threatened, stalked, etc.) with online presence. it may be that it is appropriate to treat them as analogous for these purposes, but at first glance, it seems to get a lot of the weirdnesses of the internet wrong.

Neither of those articles, or the other articles that came up when I googled his name, provide the content of the tweets in question as far as I can tell. Really no idea what is going on here.

― how's life, Thursday, July 16, 2015 2:50 PM (24 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

as far as I can tell the content was him criticising and mocking Guthrie's politics, I think Guthrie's position is that the volume of the messages is what was threatening, not the content

xp e.g. i think some distinction pertaining to choice of and control over 'social distance' might be relevant. any old creep can ask a question from an audience after a public lecture, but not any old creep can do so in a neighborhood meeting, or a departmental colloquium. if you're a 'public figure' even in some minimal way, you add some slack to the degree of social distance from you within which interactions are acceptable: it's no longer required just to be friends or family or to live on the same side of town or be the same race, there's also an additional presumption that because of your visibility, others are entitled to at least begin interactions (even if you're not obliged to continue them, or even if it's on them to try to make the interactions good ones if they have any antagonistic intent).

but when you're tweeting out into the void… aren't you entering into a space in which there are virtually no checks on 'social distance' of that sort?

Accepting "there are no checks on social distance" as a condition of twitter or "the internets" (or really any space) has the condition of ending up with an environment where only the strongest and most relentless will occupy space, will "win" and be able to choose their terms of engagement with others. I think this is pretty obviously unacceptable to everyone except the most blinkered self-described Libertarians or w/e. What to do about it exactly idk but I'm pretty sure the answer is not "wait until someone gets physically menaced by their stalker to say that it's unacceptable."

yeah well we could just mob up, no problems there thankfully

We certainly don't need more people in jail.

I think platforms should institute some kinds of restraining order type mechanisms that go beyond blocking. Or maybe moderators should have the ability to fine people for misconduct. They could put something in the user agreement about that.

Admittedly, i think some online harrassment should be a criminal issue, like those adults who relentlessly cyberbully children or whatever. Idk the specifics of this Canadian case but apparently there were no direct threats or anything so it would be really hard to define how, legally, this behavior was different from ordinary obnoxiousness.

couldn't someone just find this guy and kick the crap out of him

i'm trying to determine the degree to which i'm kidding there

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/we-cannot-let-the-internet-trolls-win/2015/07/16/91b1a2d2-2b17-11e5-bd33-395c05608059_story.html?tid=sm_tw

stoel frmo HOOS tweeter cmon buddy jump on in to the creepy liberalism thred we luv u

i can't deal tbh

it is true our luv is a difficult one

<3

http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/192439/dont-forget-to-laugh

HITLER NO JOKE

the part where it switches over to defending Dunham, Schumer etc is p gross

http://pitchfork.com/news/60536-tyler-the-creator-says-hes-been-banned-from-australia/

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/07/everything-is-problematic-university-explains.html

Preferred: people of advanced age, old people*

Problematic/Outdated: older people, elders, seniors, senior citizen

*Old people has been reclaimed by some older activists who believe the standard wording of old people lacks the stigma of the term “advanced age”. Old people also halts the euphemizing of age. Euphemizing automatically positions age as a negative.

Preferred: person living at or below the poverty line, people experiencing poverty

Problematic/Outdated: poor person, poverty-stricken person

Preferred: person of material wealth

Problematic: rich

Being rich gets conflated with a sort of omnipotence; hence, immunity from customs and the law. People without material wealth could be wealthy or rich of spirit, kindness, etc.

Preferred: people of size

Problematic/Outdated: obese*, overweight people

Preferred: person who is blind/visually impaired

Problematic: blind person, “dumb”

Preferred: U.S. citizen or Resident of the U.S.

Problematic: American

Preferred: White people, European-American individuals

Problematic: Caucasian people

Preferred: Folks, People, You All, Y’all

Problematic/Outdated: Guys (when referring to people overall)

Preferred: Other Sex

Problematic/Outdated: Opposite Sex

Preferred: Children who are gender non-conforming, Children who are gender variant

Problematic/Outdated: Girlie or Tomboy

problematic: one word
preferred: a shitload of words

Problematic: drawing your attention to a quality potentially seen as undesirable
Preferred: calling extra attention to how anxious the speaker feels about the quality

a lot of these language changes seem like a shell game to try and replace words w/ negative connotations (generally bc what they describe is something ppl associate w/ something negative, not bc the word itself is problematic) w/ more awkward phrasing bc it doesn't have any negative associations yet. maybe if it's awkward enough and no one agrees to use it, it can always stay value neutral.

person of sizeable money

yeah this is mostly just shifting negative connotations around to new/different terminology

it's the awkward phrasing/extra words that makes these so ridiculous, language follows the path of least resistance

Problematic: University dept gets paid based on the amount of policy you write.
Preferred: NY Mag writer forgot to do latest piece. Wants to turn in screenshot of a website to cover ass.

hmm, i was wondering why chait's link seemed to be dead

http://www.wmur.com/news/unh-president-offended-by-biasfree-language-guide/34421812

seems the guide was old, recently TRENDED by conservative media, and once it was the university president bus-threw it bc problematic

State Sen. Jeb Bradley, a Republican from Wolfeboro, said he was outraged by the guide and would remember it when lawmakers next consider how much money to provide to the university.

That seems fair, to punish a handful of overly sensitive policy writers by denying money to a state university. /s

Problematic: blind person, “dumb”

i thought "dumb" meant mute, not blind?

http://i.imgur.com/VOKAwGv.jpg

that mom looks like paulie's mom from the sopranos

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/thats-not-funny/399335/

caitlin flanagan visits the annual National Association for Campus Activities convention

The colleges represented were—to use a word that their emissaries regard as numinous—diverse: huge research universities, tiny liberal-arts colleges, Catholic schools, land-grant institutions. But the students’ taste in entertainment was uniform. They liked their slam poets to deliver the goods in tones of the highest seriousness and on subjects of lunar bleakness; they favored musicians who could turn out covers with cheerful precision; and they wanted comedy that was 100 percent risk-free, comedy that could not trigger or upset or mildly trouble a single student. They wanted comedy so thoroughly scrubbed of barb and aggression that if the most hypersensitive weirdo on campus mistakenly wandered into a performance, the words he would hear would fall on him like a soft rain, producing a gentle chuckle and encouraging him to toddle back to his dorm, tuck himself in, and commence a dreamless sleep—not text Mom and Dad that some monster had upset him with a joke.

'blind person' is problematic, but not 'person who is blind'? this makes zero sense. all the second one does is add unnecessary words, while the meaningful words remain unchanged.